Progress Youth Theatre Double Bill

The Importance of Being Earnest and Travesties – 22nd/23rd March

Tom Stoppard’s Travesties is distinctly shaped by Wilde’s Earnest, doubling (and tripling) many of the same scenes and situations, but in the Zurich of 1917, under the heady atmosphere of Dada and revolution. It is fitting, therefore, for the two plays to alternate during the run, but Wilde’s paper-thin play might suffer by the comparison.

Like Hamlet it often seems that Earnest is a bunch of famous quotes all strung together, until one realises that here are the originals. Where Wilde falls down, in comparison to Shakespeare, say, is that his aphoristic phrases are intended to be simply that and more than once protrude from the dialogue as a nose protrudes from a face.

The play displays the same love of paradox and confustication as Gilbert and Sullivan, and has the same happy resolution in the final act in which all muddled babies are returned to their parents and all parties are free to marry. But Wilde ends his play of the title line, with an ever so clever, but entirely vapid, ho-ho-ho, at exactly the point the D’Oyly Carte would erupt into its finale of exuberant rousing words and music. The end of Earnest by contrast is sudden and empty.

What is inspiring about the Youth Theatre’s stab at Earnest is that they get all the laughs, they make this play seem interesting and it’s more or less a success all round, even if occasionally it could use a little more pace, a dash of rhythm and adrenalin. Sam Pemberton plays Algy as Stephen Fry playing Wilde playing Algernon, which is no bad style to pick out for the part, and Chris Biddle gives Jack a good bit of life in there.

Emma Real-Davies managed to wrestle Lady Bracknell away from the horrors of Edith Evans onto an ever so slightly more human footing, while Emma Baggott’s Miss Prism swoons with consistent eloquence in the presence of her Dr Chasuble.

The stars of the show, though, are the two women: Imogen Eley as Cecily and Emily Stubbs as Gwendolyn, roles which they reprise in Travesties on the following night. Stubbs in particular gives Gwendolyn a desperate panting erotic-Victorian undertone, part sauce and part even more sauce. One wonders how Lady Bracknell dare ever leave her alone at all.

In Travesties the women’s roles are less central, perhaps, but both actors give as good as before. Eley even manages to make Cecily’s interminable speech on Lenin almost fascinating. But the lynchpin in this play is Phil Dunster as the British embassy official Henry Carr, whose memories make up the body of the show.

Neutral Zurich in 1917 was in ferment. Tristan Tzara and others had created the anti-art art movement of Dadaism, Lenin was living there in exile, and James Joyce was busy slowly writing Ulysses. Carr has the chance to play Algernon in a production of Earnest being produced by Joyce and grabs it, an experience he relates in later life from his armchair. Through the magic of stagecraft the play transports us back through unreliable and contradictory memories into the period.

Carr is on stage for the majority of the play and Dunster gives a real quality performance, tying everything together and clinging on tight as the rollercoaster rounds the hills, humps and corners that form the mosaic of his story. In the first act Thom Sellwood as Tristan Tzara, the arch-Dadaist, wrangles with Carr over the nature of art and politics, sometimes verbally, sometimes physically but always fascinatingly.

In the second half the focus shifts to Lenin, nicely played by James Mould who is transmogrified from the previous night’s Dr Chasuble, a doubling of mind-bending proportions. Although the transcripts from his letters detailing various half-baked plans for getting across war-torn Europe back to Russia where revolution was underway are amusing, the frenetic energy of the first half is rather dissipated here. But when we approach the ending of the play, a similar untangling of unlikely paradox and confusion as in Wilde’s but bracketed by a return to the study of the elderly Carr and the correcting commentary of his wife, Cecily, the result is much more satisfactory.

The scene in which Gwendolyn and Cecily meet in Earnest is recast in Travesties in the form of a popular vaudeville song (Mr Gallagher and Mr Shean) written a few years after the setting of the play, and which, it seemed, the players had never heard. As poetry the rhythms and repartee were somewhat off, but it would have been in keeping with the anarchy of other parts of the play (such as whole scenes involving Joyce written in limericks) to have burst into song at this point, which is, after all, where the eleven o’clock number belongs.

For such a young company both of these shows are surprisingly good and very fun to watch. It’s a shame that the audiences on the nights this reviewer attended were so sparse, I would like to see the seats filled with people other than parents, friends and other members of the Progress Theatre, for the simple reason that these actors deserve to play these plays to strangers.